Creativity

Serious about Creativity

July 26, 2011

Recently I came across a very interesting woman, Paula Scher. I saw a Tedtalk from a few years ago where she talked about design, play and being serious. In that talk she differentiates between being solemn and being serious. Differentiating between those words is not natural for me, because I have a general feeling of [...]

Understanding the Meaning of Concepts

July 11, 2011

We bring up our children with too much conceptual abstractions, that they have to memorize. They have to learn concepts without realizing the underlying reality. Learn concepts without understanding the meaning. They have to learn what others think is important. And slowly along the way, they lose the ability to think creative. It is like [...]

Creativity to Prevent External Pressure and Internal Decay

June 27, 2011

David Bohm on Creativity: Creativity is essential, not only for science but for the whole of life. If you get stuck in a mechanical, repetitious order, then it will degenerate. One of the problems is, that every civilization got stuck in a certain repetition. The creative energy gradually died away and that is why the [...]

Creating Something New Together

June 24, 2011

David Bohm on Dialogue: If the meaning of communication is to convey information or knowledge from one person to another, then the essence of communication is ‘to make something common’. Dialogue as a special kind of communication, is ‘to make something IN common’. Or creating something new together. But in most cases there is a [...]

Creativity Grows on Insight and Understanding

June 22, 2011

Creativity has an inherent order that grows on insight and understanding. It has to develop according to that. It might need rules and boundaries to keep growing in a certain direction. It might need ideas from others to grow even further … but … only after a certain amount of independent growth. Without interference from [...]

Creativity beyond Praise and Criticism

November 5, 2010

Still reading the letters on aesthetic education, I tried to understand the beginning of part two. In that part, Schiller paints a picture of how the individual is blinded by the age in which he lives, the society in which he is born. But also about the struggle of that society itself. That has this [...]

The Art of Language

October 28, 2010

I love it when suddenly things start to make sense, when thoughts come together. I was again reading the book On Creativity, because I was searching for the definition of some concepts. Those of creativity, aesthetics and art. All my previous posts about aesthetics point to the importance of those concepts as an essential step [...]

How to Confront Inner Conflict Instead of Ignoring it

October 9, 2010

Sometimes David Bohm says so much with one sentence, that I feel the need to take it a bit apart. It is a line in the first chapter of the book On Creativity. He describes how the mind tries to avoid contradictions. It is often too confusing or painful to stay with a certain problem, [...]

When the Mind is Trying to Escape the Awareness of Conflict

October 6, 2010

This post is about another block to creativity, a block that prevents us from expressing the creativity that is present in each of us. Self-sustaining confusion of the mind. This not the usual confusion, the confusion we experience if we just don’t understand something from outside. Bohm, in On Creativity, says that this self-sustaining confusion [...]

Recognizing Patterns from an Underlying Reality

September 29, 2010

Maybe I can better change the subtitle of this blog. Since reading the book Science, Order and Creativity, creativity seems to be the main focus of my blog. But while thinking about that, I realized it always was the main focus of my blog. Of all the blogging I did so far. My focus was [...]

How Creative Energy becomes Destructive

September 28, 2010

From the moment I started reading this chapter in the book Science, Order and Creativity, I knew it would be on my mind for a long time. Looking at the posts now, I see that I read the book in June. And still, everything I do, read and hear is in the light of that [...]

Creativity and the Need for Free Space

September 14, 2010

Money prevents creativity. This was one of the conclusions in the previous post. Another post was about something else that prevents creativity: the need for approval. Both conclusions were based on sound research. Of course it is all a bit more complex than that, but still the conclusions were very interesting. I think this is [...]

Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose

August 31, 2010

This weekend I saw some very interesting videos on Youtube. One of those videos Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us, was so interesting that I wanted to take a closer look. So I uploaded the video below and took notes of the conclusions. Which were surprising, but at the same time, made very [...]

What is the Self?

July 27, 2010

This week I found another interview with David Bohm. Somewhere in that interview he talks about why we need the space to develop creativity. He wrote about that in the book Science, Order and Creativity and I already have several posts about one chapter of that book. The chapter states that creativity is very important, [...]

The Development of Creativity

July 18, 2010

I recently had a guestpost on the blog Thoughtwrestling about the place of creativity in human development as a whole. In the post I also mentioned how I see the development of creativity itself. I wrote another post on that before, where I used my model of development to describe creativity in different forms (like [...]

The Danger of Praise and Reward as Fuel for Creativity

June 14, 2010

This post is going to be centred around several sentences. A few lines from the book Science, Order and Creativity. The moment I read those lines, I really felt this was true. By analyzing it here in this post, I hope to emphasise the very important distinctions that I think are essential. I will let [...]

Inner Drive or Navigation from Outside

June 9, 2010

In this post I want to see how the conclusions from the previous post fit the model I use on this blog. There are many ways to look at it, but for now I want to focus on the main point of that post: the need for approval. As children we are sensitive to authority. [...]

How Creativity is Blocked by the Need for Approval

June 7, 2010

Creativity is a natural potential energy in humans, which becomes destructive if it is blocked. This is a conclusion of a chapter in the book that I want to review in this post. The first part of the above conclusion says that creativity is an inherent characteristic in humans, which is shown by experiments with [...]

Creativity in the Whole of Life

June 5, 2010

After I wrote my previous post, I read the chapter ‘Creativity in the whole of life’ for the second time. The chapter from a book called ‘Science, Order and Creativity’. And this time I was even more convinced that it reflects my thoughts on many things that I want to write about on this blog. [...]

English Books in Dutch Libraries

June 3, 2010

I love books that are non-fiction. It is not that I do not like fiction, sometimes I do, but most of the books that I read in my life were non-fiction. I used to spend many hours in our library looking for answers to questions I had, taking as much books home as I could. [...]

Creative Development

February 9, 2010

One word that can describe the first sign of the individual part of the zodiac is creativity. There are many more words that can be used for that part. Expression, selfcentred, arrogant, artistic, honorable, selfassured, ego, confident, pride, attention, authentic. But in this blogpost I want to focuss on the word creativity. Creativity as a [...]